Narrow Results

We extend the Microscopic Representation approach to the quantitative study of religious and folk stories: A story encrypting symbolically the creation is deconstructed into its simplest conceptual elements and their relationships. We single out a particular kind of relationship which we call "diagonal (or transitive) link": given two relations between the couples of elements AB and respectively BC, the "diagonal link" is the (composite) relation AC. We find that the diagonal links are strongly and systematically correlated with the events in the story that are considered crucial by the experts. We further compare the number of diagonal links in the symbolic creation story with a folk tale, which ostensibly narrates the same overt succession of events (but without pretensions of encrypting additional meanings). We find that the density of diagonal links per word in the folk story is lower by a factor of two. We speculate that, as in other fields, the simple transitive operations acting on elementary objects are at the core of the emergence and recognition of macroscopic meaning and novelty in complex systems.

Nick Land once described hyperstitions as “semiotic productions that make themselves real” — stories that actualize themselves and produce their own realities, imagining new futures for us all. As the full effects of human industrial civilization continue to unveil themselves in the Anthropocene as the beginnings of a process that will soon render the planet Earth uninhabitable, it becomes essential to track the stories that are developing and expanding their own mutant machinic systems of reproduction in order to understand what futures will have been available to us. In this chapter, we seek to become students of the mechanisms of replicative processes of some of the hyperstitions that are at work in organizations, individual and collective, of the Anthropocene. To do this, we track the imbrication of a series of stories of Thomas the fieldmouse, a meeting about something called “sustainable innovation,” and journal entries about a mall that lives forever at the end of the world in order to understand hyperstitions and the role that they can play in the storying of the future.

The core capabilities of an organization include critical skills of employees, management systems, and norms and values. Core capabilities may be transferred formally and explicitly. However, much knowledge, particularly knowledge with rich tacit dimensions, is transferred informally through processes of socialization and internalization. We focus on two transfer mechanisms—mentoring and storytelling—that can leverage the knowledge of an organization, particularly its tacit knowledge, to build core capabilities. We draw on relevant research in learning and cognitive psychology to clarify the conditions under which mentoring and storytelling can be most effective as carriers of knowledge. Finally, we present recommendations for specific managerial practices that follow from our analysis.